230 Reconstructing, Reimagining: 1865–1900was perhaps beginning to have doubts about the effectiveness and viability of his
hero. Certainly, in his next book, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889),
set mainly in Arthurian England, Twain turned to a vernacular hero, Hank Morgan,
with a more programmatic, reforming dimension. Hank, “a Yankee of Yankees,” is
transported back to the world of King Arthur, and is determined to transform it
according to his model of progress and industry. He fails, and, in describing his
failure, Twain equally fails to achieve a reconciliation, let alone a synthesis, of his
romantic and realistic impulses. The Tragedy of Puddn’head Wilson (1894) is even
darker, the comedy even more biting and desperate. This is in part because Wilson
himself – although not the narrator, the presiding genius of the book – is given to
caustic comments such as the one supplied as an epigraph to the conclusion: “It was
wonderful to find America, but it would have been even more wonderful to miss it.”
But it is also because the closest thing the story has to an authentic rebel, the slave
Roxana, is comprehensively defeated. In any event, she does not tell her own story.
Her voice is muted, partly because she is trapped within a narrative that is characterized
by closure and ironic pessimism and partly because, when she is allowed to talk, she
never begins to articulate rebellion or resist the racism of her owners. “Training is
everything,” Wilson tells us; and Roxana, together with all the other characters, seems
hopelessly trapped in training, the prisonhouse of determinism.
The deepening pessimism of Twain, in his later years, is evident from the story
“The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg” (1900) and the longer narrative, The
Mysterious Stranger, which was published posthumously after editorial work by
other hands in 1916. “I believe I can make it tell what I think of Man,” he wrote of
the latter work, “... and what a shabby poor ridiculous thing he is, and how mis-
taken he is in his estimate of ... his place among the animals.” Twain had begun with
a gift for comedy and the belief that it could be used to expose the gap between real-
ity and illusion. He ended with the comedy turned bitter, to dark satire and polemic,
and with the belief that illusion is all we have, a world of surface and gesture. He had
begun with the conviction that there were two forces at war in human nature, feeling
and training, and that it was possible to rediscover feeling and restore originality,
spontaneity. He ended convinced quite otherwise, that training was all people had,
that they could only obey environmental and social conditioning. He had begun
with a belief in human nature, its essential innocence, and the rider, the related
belief that this innocence could be resurrected in America – that, in short, the
American Adam was possible. He ended by calling the human race “damned” for its
irreversible servility to systems and surface, and by regarding the American project
as a futile, absurd one: his spokesperson was no longer an American Adam, like
Huck, but a cynical outsider who observes humankind with a mixture of desperate
laughter and contempt – like Puddn’head Wilson or Satan in The Mysterious
Stranger. On a personal level, Twain continued to enjoy what he termed the “grace,
peace, and benediction” of his family and circle of friends until the end of his life. On
the social, he remained an ardent reformer and a brilliantly witty, judiciously savage
critic of authority and champion of the underdog – attacking European imperialism
in Africa, for instance, and American imperialism in the Spanish–American War.GGray_c03.indd 230ray_c 03 .indd 230 8 8/1/2011 7:54:18 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 18 AM